PREPARING FOR BLACK SWANS
Five years ago, floods ravaged Alberta — leaving residents to clean up the costliest disaster in Canadian history. So why did officials earn praise rather than blame? As the authors of Too Critical to Fail argue, context is all. This is the second in a series of excerpts from this year’s Donner Prize nominees, a $50,000 award for the best public policy book in Canada. Too Critical to Fail was written by the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy’s scholarly director Kevin Quigley and research analysts Ben Bisset and Bryan Mills. The winner will be announced May 15th.
On May 13, 2014, while he worked with his young son on his boat in the backyard, Thomas Harding was surrounded by a SWAT team, sirens wailing, and led away in handcuffs. Later that day he and two colleagues were marched into a makeshift courtroom in full view of the press and charged with 47 counts of criminal negligence causing death.
While the dramatic nature of the arrest may have been a shock to his young son, it must have been more of a surprise to Harding. Everyone knew where Harding lived; he was not considered a flight risk. The events to which the charges pertained had occurred a full ten months earlier.
The temporary courthouse was in Lac-Mégantic, a town most people had never heard of before the early hours of July 6, 2013, when the brakes failed on an unattended freight train carrying 7.7 million litres of petroleum in the form of crude oil. The resulting fires and explosions killed dozens of people, forced the evacuation of 2,000 more, and destroyed much of the downtown area.
In its report on the incident — the deadliest rail disaster in Canada since Confederation — the Transportation Safety Board pointed to numerous failures: the fact that the train was left unattended on a main line, the failure to set enough handbrakes, the lack of a backup safety mechanism, poor maintenance on the locomotive, to name just a few.
Twenty-five different companies were accused of sharing responsibility for the derailment, and they contributed approximately $460 million for an out-of-court settlement fund for the victims. To date, six employees of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, including Harding, the train’s locomotive engineer, have faced criminal charges. MMA faced potential fines but the CEO, Edward Burkhardt, has never appeared in court. The company filed for bankruptcy protection — it did not hold sufficient insurance to cover its losses — and has since been sold.
Despite the Transportation Safety Board’s conclusion that “the tragedy in Lac-Mégantic was not caused by one single person, action or organization,” the government has also refused to hold a public inquiry or accept any responsibility, and it is unclear how public officials have been held to account for their role.
Three causes identified by the TSB were attributed to the regulator, Transport Canada: inadequate oversight of operational changes, limited follow-up on safety deficiencies, and an ineffective safety management audit program. Transport Canada was one of the contributors to the settlement fund but refused to disclose how much it contributed.
At virtually the same time flames ripped through LacMégantic, a good portion of Alberta sat underwater. Between June 19 and July 12, 2013, heavy rainfall triggered the worst flooding in the province’s history. Five people died and over 100,000 were forced to leave their homes. Thirty communities declared local states of emergency and the province declared its first-ever state of emergency. Most estimates put the final costs of the flood in excess of $6 billion, which made it the costliest disaster in Canadian history.
The findings of the flood post-mortem conducted by the accounting firm MNP LLP were largely positive. The report concluded that extensive emergency management skills, capability, and legislation exist within the province. It deemed the Public Safety Governance framework document developed after the 2011 Slave Lake fires to be effective and recommended its continued use. Polls suggested people felt very positive about the role of public servants in the flood response, with 95 per cent of Albertans describing the work done by emergency responders as “excellent” or “good.”
We might classify both the Lac-Mégantic derailment and the Alberta floods as black swan events, which are lowprobability/high-consequence disasters with elements of randomness and bad luck. Yet the juxtaposition of these two cases raises important questions about the manner in which we prepare for and respond to disasters in our communities.
Why were Alberta town planners not held to account for decisions that exposed communities to such devastating natural dangers? Why were some actors but not others held responsible in Lac-Mégantic?
The comparison between the Lac-Mégantic derailment and the Alberta floods highlights an important dimension of critical infrastructure failures: however random they may seem, disasters occur in a particular context, which influences the likelihood and consequence of these events and contributes to the manner in which we interpret, respond to, and apportion blame for them.
Part of the challenge after a disaster is interpreting and conveying the appropriate meaning of the event. But black swans can also create an opportunity for positive change, a notion captured by Rahm Emanuel during the 2008 financial collapse when he warned fellow policy-makers that they should not let a good crisis go to waste.